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From the requirments part of the bounty article:

Making a program that only geeks can use won't cut it. The goal, after all, is to keep people out of jail.

They were probably talking about WASTE when they mentioned this. My friends and I tried it for a while. It was too complex to set up and maintain. My friends need simpler point and click installation. Firewalls gave a lot of greif, too.

I have, however, gotten several of my friends to switch to GAIM after they've realized how crappy and bloated MSN messenger is. I hope something useful can come out of this.

...fairly stupid. Not only is this a mix of two seperate things, but why would making a plugin for GAIM do anything? It's the same thing for people who want to merge WASTE with Miranda or GAIM. I do fine with my P2P seperate from my IM, and I don't WANT P2P with my AIM, etc. It's not going to help stop the RIAA either, they will just go after people using the plugin. I'll take mine seperate (and secure as in darknet) thank you.

I love cdbkup. http://cdbkup.sourceforge.net/

1) Monthly a full backup (Level 0)
2) Weekly run a mid-level backup (Level 3)
3) daily run a low level backup (level 5)

it can use multisession CDs, so for your daily backups, Unless you have a very busy computer, you can just use the same CD for all daily backups

how it works is each level backs up any files that have changed since the last highest level backup

Level 0 backs up everything
level 3 would back up everything that has changed since the last level 2, but since level 2 doesn't exist, it checks for a level 1, and then finds the level 0, so it backs up everything that has changed since the level 0,
level 5 performs the same type of opperation, and backs up everything that has chagned since the level 3

Another almost standard scheme is:
Monthly level 0
Every Sunday and wednesday Level 3
Every other day level 5

I've been looking into Windows software packaging applications, in particular Jitit's Thinstall and BitArt's Fusion.

Have you heard of the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System? It's Free, and it works very well.

http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

By buying a company. How like them.

Wow, the myth of Lookout is extraordinary.

Here's the facts - Lookout is a trivial shell extension on Outlook (a rather half-assed one at that, missing countless trivial features while at the same time dramatically reducing the stability of Outlook. Indeed this was likely why Microsoft sought to supress the product after "acquiring" Lookout), and the "search technology" in it is actually a open source .NET port of Jakarta Lucene (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lucenedotnet/). Lookout is nothing more than a file/email iterator with a simple GUI.

It is absolutely astounding that people keep reiterating this myth that Microsoft, the people who've had full-text search as a feature of Office (findfast), and then a part of the OS (indexing service), not to mention in specific products (SQL Server full-text indexing), needed to "acquire" some trivial application, actually built atop an open source project, to show them the way in search. The idea that Lookout, which they "acquired" just a few months ago, is what gave them the start on desktop search is just awe inspiringly idiotic.

About the "acquired" - The acquisition of Lookout was almost certainly an HR headcount acquisition. They wanted to hire one of the people involved, but they wanted them to wrap up their current project, so this so-called acquisition occurred.

This is all so inane - Microsoft, and virtually every other company, have been talking about the all-encompassing database filesystem for over a decade. How unsurprizing that a Mac fan believes that Apple invented it.

I suggest ASSP.
I've been using it for months for various customers in production networks. Free, written in Perl and runs on *nix or Windows. Can integrate with just about any mail server. I use it with Exchange. It also uses clamAV to do some basic virus filtering.

Real men don't make backups... but, hell, who needs to if you can resurrect them from the dead

Well, I'm proud to use PGP Wipe (8.1) and a nuke or two when I need my files wiped, so... hopefully I'm one of those people that needs to make backups... fully encrypted, of course.

- dshaw

Have you tried any of the OSS DOS emulators on the 'net? Some of the first Google hits are DOSBox (looks really good and focused on gaming), DOSEMU (hmmm...is it still updated?) and the big boy FreeDOS (very active community).

I haven't tried any of these personally in quite a while so YMMV.

Yes, it's a great tool for relatively static sites. For dynamic ones, I'll generally whip together something with HttpUnit or LWP so that I can simulate a user going through a dynamic, multi-step process. They do require more horsepower to generate high load, but accurate user behavior simulation gives you a lot more confidence that your app won't fall over when the hordes come.

Last winter I've got an idea of trying a software competition to develop a video streamer for the network cameras developed by Elphel (both software and hardware are GPL'ed). I decided to try Russian software developers (I'm Russian myself) so I wrote an article in a Russian online magazine "Computerra" and offered a $3000 prize for the best streamer to use with the camera (the code was to retain author's copyright and be released under GNU/GPL). I did not expect many participants and thought I'l sacrifice 3 cameras. But it turned different and I've sent out 9 of them - 4 to Russia, 3 - to Ukraine, 1 - to Germany and 1 to India (the article was in Russian - that restricted participants to Russian-reading).

Of those 9 participants 6 reached the finish line and the winner is Ukrainian Alexander Melichenko. What amazed me was that I've got the first version of his steamer in just a couple weeks after the announcement _before_ he received the hardware! Hi used my online camera to download his application over the Internet and made it working. And the camera uses Axis ETRAX100LX CPU - something he never programmed before.

All that software is now on our Sourceforge project page - https://sourceforge.net/projects/elphel.

Maybe they're trying to test ways of making flying more stressful.
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C Language Unit Testing

I store firefox on a hi-speed usb 2.0 drive. With a custom script (on Windows: yes, a .vbs file - I could have used a batch script but I didn't want a dos window), you can store your profile on the drive. This way I can carry everything with me - my bookmarks, history, and other nice things.

USB drives are useful for more than just firefox. I store some useful Java programs like jEdit and Saxon. I even have a copy of Cygwin for GNU hacking in Windows. Just learn how to use the windows scripting host. Even though it sometimes has lots of bugs (or, more precisely, too many Microsoft programs automatically run wsh scripts without safety measures); it'll simplify your life.

Of course they are only likely to get information from people they can easily find, such as Tivo Customers and Sat TV companies who supply boxes with recording cabpabilities.

They will totally miss those using Mythtv ( http://www.mythtv.org/ ) or Freevo ( http://freevo.sourceforge.net/ ) or any other home brew solution.

On a b/w limited server? Nitpick: at gnomefiles it says "aims to be a professional ..." Also warns this is a beta, and offers the Sourceforge forum as help. For a "pro-level" digital audio app I would expect to be able to pay money for help, GPL or no. Having run thru a mini zoo of daw apps in the past 15 years, we always come back to Digidesign. As an earlier post said, the tight coupling of h/w + s/w means it always works as advertised.

The list of dependencies for Wired is also a bit worrying, but with supreme confidence the ToDo file is empty. The source is available at Sourceforge so I'll try to buld it, and report back if there's anything interesting...

On a b/w limited server? Nitpick: at gnomefiles it says "aims to be a professional ..." Also warns this is a beta, and offers the Sourceforge forum as help. For a "pro-level" digital audio app I would expect to be able to pay money for help, GPL or no. Having run thru a mini zoo of daw apps in the past 15 years, we always come back to Digidesign. As an earlier post said, the tight coupling of h/w + s/w means it always works as advertised.

The list of dependencies for Wired is also a bit worrying, but with supreme confidence the ToDo file is empty. The source is available at Sourceforge so I'll try to buld it, and report back if there's anything interesting...

Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price.

Also there is a difference between people saying they will switch brands, and people actually doing it. Market research is right up there with astrology and tarot cards in predictive accuracy.
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Write Code That Writes Code

Also if brand names don't matter, why are you posting on slashdot instead of mycoolblog.blogspot.com?
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Write Code That Writes Code

Gotta love those finnish hackers.

I assume you mean Oskari Tammelin?

I love Buzz and use it for a guitar processor. I totally agree that Buzz is an amazing piece of free software.

However, I find the whole "hard drive crash" thing awful convenient. Remember, Oskari was the guy who was "dumb" enough to develop without backups and then have a "convenient" hard drive crash shortly before Buzz plugin support appeared in Fruityloops. http://www.flstudio.com/

Shortly after the crash we saw the appearance of XS-1 and BuzzVST as well. Hmmmmmmm.

Personally, this "crash" looks like a few cards up the sleeve and a personal marketing move. Oh well, for the most part mod scenesters are complete asshats so who could blame Oskari for turning his back on them?

Here's hoping some Buzz clones can pick up the torch someday...

http://buzzle.spr.at/

http://buzztard.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/venomtwist/

http://neuro.snusnu.at/muwiki/index.php/Cockslap

"Close, but no importing .aiff"
Perhaps you're using an old version? I've used 1.2.2 for reading and writing AIFF. The Audacity Manual also shows it as supported.

Several people above mentioned Audacity as a replacement on Linux. In fact, it has been ported to both Windows and Mac OS X as well.

There is a reason why this is a specialty. There isn't a clear answer.

The answer depends on many factors such as:
- how heavy are the pages (many pictures?)
- what's the platform (Lamp/J2EE/etc....)
- how is the usage?, if someone gives you a figure for concurrent users, ask yourself what they mean by that. Some apps have users contstantly submitting, others once in a few minutes
- how are they connected? Reverse proxy can really help for slow connections!
- if you have performance problems, investigate where the pain really is. Is it the (R)DBMS, or the app server, memory IO.
- etc. etc.

Most of all: test! Get something like grinder, or opensta and put some serious load and stress on the setup. See where it hurts.
Make sure that if you have a problem, you actually fix the right problem. It is ok to add hardware, but you have to know what hardware to get.
Also many problems can be handled by configuration, such as preventing the system to come to crashing halt by limiting the amount of connections to the amount you can handle.

Look overhere Perl strategy doc It has some good advice that will help you also in non perl environments.

Yes, there's one available for linux, and it's even in debian. It's called hydrogen.

There is also advanced drum machine for Linux. It's called Hydrogen.

VST, LADSPA, OSC plugins, JACK audio support, internationalization. Rosegarden project homepage

Ardour multi-track sound editor (not MIDI, I think)

Rosegarden Audio and MIDI sequencer

The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor

Someone burn them a copy of Audacity and send them the CD...

treemenu has a large variety of viewing methods. i use them for different purposes, but find it easy and friendly and fast when needed.

see also:
links
del.icio.us
bookmark4u
bkm
plasticbag discussion
and of course all the PIMs(personal information managers) in the works...

treemenu has a large variety of viewing methods. i use them for different purposes, but find it easy and friendly and fast when needed.

see also:
links
del.icio.us
bookmark4u
bkm
plasticbag discussion
and of course all the PIMs(personal information managers) in the works...

I bet if MS had used Audacity for their sound files, that would raise at least the same amount of outcry that we have here about them using a pirated version of SoundForge. The only difference would be that the gist of the conversation would be "Ha ha, guess Microsoft doesn't hate OSS so much after all!"

Oh, the other difference would that MS would still be on the legal side of the law.

For Firefox there is a great plugin called Spellbound. You just right click in a textarea or input box and select "Check Spelling". There is also a plugin for IE called IESpell which works well for those who still use IE for some reason.

And this all depends on the situation. Take something like iTeXMac. To compile a tex project with it, I hit Cmd-Alt-T. Much faster than switching to another terminal, typing pdflatex my_proj.tex, waiting for it to finish, typing pdflatex my_proj.tex again until it reaches its fixpoint, then refreshing my view of the resulting pdf.

Even if I whipped up a script or makefile, its still going to be faster as I can do everything from within the same app. The command line has its uses, and GUIs have their uses. One is not strictly better than the other.

Isn't LAME GPL?

It is LGPL, but as far as I know redistribution in binary form still requires a patent license, if you're located in a country where software is patentable; source is covered by free speech. For more information, see About LAME.

Xaos is also a nice way of looking at fractals. It can also work as Xscreensaver.

Use CRM114 Instead of grep.

It's been described as "like grep if it was bitten by a radioactive spider". In a nutshell it allows you do define sliding windows and search for phrases inside those windows.

It's way cool.

Source Output It is an imagemap, so you can click anywhere to zoom in.

Source Output It is an imagemap, so you can click anywhere to zoom in.

Sounds like you want something like MPG321.

What video memory? The ZX81 generates screen output something like this: an interrupt routine eating 75% CPU time feeds character data to hardware shift registers, that produce a line of black&white dots on the screen. Repeat (carefully timed) until screen is done, and then remaining 25% CPU time (vertical blank period) is left for doing useful work until new TV frame begins.

It also had "fast mode" that did away with this, leaving snow on the TV screen (but at a 4x gain in processing speed!). I always loved this machine for its wonderful use of the limited hardware. You can even build your own, or personally type in a flicker-free space invaders clone on it.

Still used for things like controlling model trains or stepper motors, or re-built by programming the entire machine's function into a FPGA. Note: color in screenshot on last link is surely not on original hardware...

Ahem...

http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/

Instead of "The Continued Advance of VoIP", the title should have been "The Continued Decline of Slashdot". VoIP is old news now. I don't know anyone who doesn't have it. Even my grandmother got it last month.
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C Unit Testing Framework

The other problem with hashcash is that it requires that I force my senders to use this algorithm. I don't want to tell people they can't write to me just because they don't want to use hashcash. I want to get e-mail from everyone.

I have been using SpamAssassin and it is working fairly well.
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Automatic Code Generation

Ogg For QuickTime/iTunes is here. Just copy it to C:\WINDOWS\system32\QuickTime. Works great.

I just upgraded my 700MHz G3 iBook from 10.3.5 to 10.3.6. Everything went smoothly, but now iTunes stops occasionally for periods of varying length when playing ogg encoded music. I'm using the Ogg Vorbis component 1.0d8 available here.

Anyone else notice this? This never happened with 10.3.5. Would it be better with the other one? Must check...

Most of the voting software used during the 2004 Presidential elections were proprietary code by private corporations that have political interests on which candidate winning. It is unimaginable how these votes can be considered as legitimate when there is no method to trace accuracy.

Open source voting software such as this one should be replacing proprietary code from private corporations.

I like iTunes a lot for maintaining and playing audio files on a local drive but I have problems with how it handles streaming audio.

Every time you play a new stream, iTunes permanently adds it to its library. While it's nice to keep streams you listen to regularly in the library, it's annoying to have to clean up the ones you don't want to listen to again or that broke.

This is particularly annoying when you're using a some kind of online jukebox, like Namp! With an online jukebox, iTunes will add a library entry for *each* track.

Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...

First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.

The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.

One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.

Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time. :)

There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.

There are a few more for OS X:

Escape Medical Viewer
DreamFird aka jBoxView
iRad

More search results here and here . So in this regards you have your choice of solutions. I think even GraphicsConverter might be able to view the images, but not the associated data.

I figure their open source programs like NSIS will stay open, but what about programs like shoutcast?
And please tell me that someone will be maintaining BEEP

We run an Enemy Territory Server called Beginner's Park 3. We have a website at http://bpark3.com/. We use a slightly customized version of the systats package to track our stats. You can even chat "!stats" in-game on our servers (see links to our servers from the webpage) and get a summary of your stats including your ranking, accuracy, favorite weapon, etc.
systats is a fairly active project and has a really nice stat tracking system but it is very person centric. IMO, it's great for public servers but for clan matches games I think I'd prefer a program called StatWhore which is designed to summarize stopwatch games.

For our stats system, to try and deal with "stat-whoring"---where, for example, players allow themselves to be killed over and over by another to boost the latter's stats---we developed a weak secondary dominance statistic that basically awards more points to those who kill players with higher K / D ratios. This has helped to encourage the better or more stat-conscientious players to play against each other instead of ganging up on the weaker players.

So I recommend systats for public-type servers, it's very flexible, and I recommend StatWhore for matches. As for whether or not stats are important, I think they're fun as long as you don't find yourself worrying everytime you play about how it'll affect your stats. I think a good stats system should try and prevent that. We've tried to do this, but are still considering improvements.

--Zaedyn (aka auachapan)

Greylisting is when you configure your mail server to reply, the first time a message is sent to it from a particular originator, with a SMTP try-again-later message. This requires the upstream server to hold the message in their spool for a certain amount of time. The next time they try, it'll be accepted.

I use it. It works, brilliantly; it's reduced the flood of incoming spam from several hundred messages a day to about 5. And it means that the spam gets blocked before it gets transferred, which means it doesn't use up my (or anyone else's) bandwidth.

Get more information here. My favourite greylisting SMTP proxy is Spey, but then, it would be: I wrote it...